PACIFIC CREST TRAIL SEGMENT OFFERS DESERT, MOUNTAIN VIEWS

Pacific Crest Trail

Before you go: Download a copy of the trail map at the Laguna Mountain Volunteer Association website,
lmva.net/id3.html. For a map of more of the PCT heading north from here, use the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park Trail Map published by Tom Harrison Maps, or, of course, the map of the PCT itself.

Trailhead: To reach the Pioneer Mail Picnic Area and PCT trail head, from I-8 heading east, exit at S1, Sunrise Highway, heading north to Laguna Mountain Recreation Area. The Pioneer Mail area is on the right, just past mile marker 29.

Distance: I went about 2.2 miles one-way, for about a 4.4-mile round-trip.

Difficulty: The total elevation gain was about 600 feet — very gradual. Mostly easy.

A memorial rests near the launching site for hang gliders on the Pacific Crest Trail north of Pioneer Mail in the Laguna Mountains. Priscilla Lister

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A memorial rests near the launching site for hang gliders on the Pacific Crest Trail north of Pioneer Mail in the Laguna Mountains. Priscilla Lister

This segment of the Pacific Crest Trail on the eastern edge of the Laguna Mountains offers panoramic views down some 4,000 feet into the desert and across to the Oriflamme and Sawtooth mountain ranges.

At a few points on this piece of the PCT, you really feel as though you are on the rim of the world with the narrowest part of the trail truly hugging the vertical cliff.

This part of the trail has passed through Laguna Mountains proper with its lovely pine and fir trees. Here you are in a transition zone between mountains and desert, a treeless chaparral habitat filled with lots of blooming buckwheat, chamise (not blooming in summer) and manzanita.

The red-barked manzanita in mid to late summer sports bright orange berries. The mountain mahogany shrub displays its feathery styles that appear after its flowers have dropped, “giving plants beautiful ghostly aspect,” notes James Lightner in his book, “San Diego County Native Plants.” Some of the mountain mahogany I saw were covered in so many of those feathery tendrils, their flowers must have been thick a few months earlier.

I began this hike at the Pioneer Mail Picnic Area off Highway S1, Sunrise Highway, at about the 29.3 mile marker. A large parking area, it’s a good equestrian staging spot, and the trail invites horseback riders as well as hikers. Bikers are not allowed on the Pacific Crest Trail. But dogs on leashes are allowed on this part of it — the only parts of the trail where you cannot take dogs are when it passes through national or state parks.

The first half-mile of this hike takes you to Kwaaymii Point, a 5,440-foot-high rocky promontory that looks down into Cottonwood Canyon which separates the Oriflamme from the Sawtooth mountains.

The views extend to Little Blair Valley and Vallecito Valley in the desert, backdropped by, from north to south, 5,432-foot Granite Mountain, Pinyon Mountains and Vallecito Mountains.

The Kwaaymii Laguna Band of Mission Indians lived here during summers in Laguna for thousands of years, spending winters in the desert below. The Kwaaymii are a subgroup of the Kumeyaay, formerly called Diegueño. The Kumeyaay consist of two related groups: the Ipai, extending north of San Diego River to Escondido and Lake Henshaw, and the Tipai, extending south of San Diego River including Laguna Mountains and down into northern Baja California.

But after an 1860 smallpox outbreak and the 1918 influenza epidemic most of the Kwaaymii had been wiped out. Tom Lucas, the last full-blooded Kwaaymii, died in 1989. Born here in Laguna in 1903, as the only Kwaaymii remaining he petitioned the U.S. government to have the reservation deeded to him as private property. The 320-acre Lucas Ranch — where his daughter Carmen still lives — was badly burned in the 2003 Cedar fire, but the cabin her father built there in the 1920s remains. Carmen often serves as a local native archaeological consultant.

Just before Kwaaymii Point, you’ll note a couple of concrete barricades holding up that cliffside edge. This portion is actually a former segment of Sunrise Highway, according to Jerry Schad in “Afoot and Afield San Diego County.”

“Before 1975, this was a hair-raising part of Sunrise Highway; but that was before the road was bypassed and replaced by a new, wider and less spectacular stretch of roadway,” Schad wrote.

This wide part of the trail hosts a popular launching pad for local hang-gliders, a few of whom I saw the Sunday I was there. There are three markers here that memorialize three local pilots — Ray Petersen, Richard M. Zadorozny and Tab Kennedy.

I encountered a group of four adults with a 4-year-old child in a backpack carrier. Daniel Cimarosti, Rosalind Haselbeck, Allison Renshaw and Rich Williams, with Atticus, the son of Renshaw and Williams, were continuing a segmented hike along the PCT, with Williams blogging about it along the way. The Leucadia residents started at the Mexico border in June and are day-hiking 6- to 18-mile segments intermittently. “We’re at mile 53.85 today,” Williams told me. (Their blog:
hikingpct.blogspot.com/).

When the trail begins to turn inland away from that edge, at about the 2-mile point from Pioneer Mail, you’ll notice lots of burned manzanita that look like ghost shrubs. With the less interesting views, I went just a bit further, turned around and retraced my way back.

Pioneer Mail, a sign says at the trail head, is dedicated to the pioneers of the first transcontinental mail route from Texas to San Diego known as the Birch Overland Pioneer Mail Trail that began operation in 1857. The actual route was located north of this facility. The first men who crossed these mountains used pack animals, so it was dubbed the Jackass Mail Route.